hello and welcome to Startup to scale up I'm a Raja on today's show we're putting the spotlight on palmona which is a demi Fine Jewelry startup what's Demi Fine Jewelry take a look [Music] first if you find gold too costly for daily wear and if imitation jewelry irritates your skin consider the new Option Demi find jewelry Monas founded in 2022 by amol and palvi are pioneers of this category in India the startup crafts its products with sterling silver and gold veret which is a high quality type of goldplated jewelry which outlasts regular goldplated products with
a wide range of designs and high quality jewelry this startup promises to offer affordable luxury to all and for more I'm being joined by the co-founder and CEO herself palvi thank you so much for joining us and welcome to the show you've had quite an interesting journey I must say so if you can just take us through that and tell us how did this idea come about first of all thank you so much for having me on the show I'm very very excited to discuss all the details and all the stories of fonas with you
um so I'm um basically also a founder of karagiri it's a sari brand so I started karagiri in 2017 and then sold it to Mena brands in 2021 so post that um we wanted to do something different we wanted to uh create a brand in a space where there's a huge void me as a customer I I love to wear jewelry I love to accessorize you know I had so many gold jewelry pieces because um uh I as a customer I cannot wear imitation jewelry because whenever I wear imitation jewelry I get rashes so uh
and my husband he's an orthopedic surgeon uh so one F day we were just sipping coffee and he was telling me about one of the surgeries he had performed and we were discussing about all the surgical equipments so I just out of curiosity asked him that how frequently do you guys change your surgical equipments in the operation theater so he said it's been a decade that they have been using the same equipments and I was very shocked as a common man because I asked him because you put those instruments in somebody's body like literally every
single day and don't they tarnish or don't they go bad and then he's he's he told me that those um materials those uh surgical equipments are made of surgical stainless steel which does not react to human skin and human body and that was like an moment and then I said why can't we create jewelry out of it you know because in India right now there are two major categories one is fine jewelry which is pure gold diamond platinum and other is imitation jewelry which is made of brass nickel these metals are not very skin friendly
and they are so doctors do not really you know advise you to wear those metals on your skin so there's a huge void in between in terms of price points as well as in terms of availability of the designs so we thought why not create something which is you know as good as gold in terms of look and feel um but also not very expensive as gold and that's where we started researching and we came across this category called Demi FY which is huge in the US and UK right now because there people don't wear
gold at all they only wear Demi fine and then we realized you know what this actually is something which is completely missing in India and there's a huge void that we can fill using palmon as and that's how Palmas was born jewelry is a huge market and affordable imitation jewelry even more so uh how what makes you stand out from your competitors so it's a very interesting question so there are lot of players in um you know go plated jewelry space right now but what we are doing is completely different and how how how we
are different is the technology that we're using for plating the materials so um our jewelry is plated with very thick layer of gold which is 2.5 Micron layer of gold on the base metal so we either use surgical stainless steel or sterling silver as base metal and plated with 2.5 Micron layer of gold now this this thickness of the gold is so much that after the jewelry is produced it looks exactly like gold it feels like gold and most importantly it stays gold I mean there are no dos and don'ts you can wear it in
water you can wear it wherever you want so we we say that we craft this jewelry for daily so it does not come with any dos and dos so that's where we stand out and our jewelry also comes with lifetime warranty so that's something that actually you know builds a lot of instills a lot of trust in the customer because when the brand says that it's giving lifetime warranty we are very sure about the quality of the jewelry we're very sure that it's not going to fade it's not going to react with your skin and
you can enjoy it as good as a gold jewelry you can just wear it and forget about it so I think that's the major differentiating factor all right so obviously like you said quality is extremely important but achieving that balance between what's stylish between affordability quality and Lasting that's also quite a tall ask so how do you achieve that balance absolutely so I think uh jewelry is basically a design game right unless you like the design you will not buy it so we have a huge team of In-House designers wherein we create new designs every
single week so we have a Friday drop model so we launch 15 designs every Friday on our Instagram live so that keeps that freshness going and that's where we get most of our repeat purchases from So currently our repeat purchase rate is at 30% which is way above industry standard um at the same time um because one of the co-founder amol who is also an orthopedic surgeon who is a doctor so the instinct is to create something which is very very safe for the end consumer irrespective of how expensive or how you know the margins
are so I think consumer safety is something that we definitely I mean that's our core Focus area so I think we combine these two um so beautifully that all the designs that come out um they're so minimal they're so delicate and perfect for daily use so all the genes and Millennials crowd that we are targeting right now they are completely in awe with it and we get so many like good consumer feedbacks even the celebrities are wearing it every single day so dipika padukon from dipika to to Anaya to sanjana sangi you name any Alister
and they have W Palmas and got so such amazing feedbacks from them so I think it's it's just blend of everything you know right materials right ethics and consumer feedback you know club together is is sort of helping us grow in the space a lot so that brings me to my next question what is the kind of expansion plans that you are looking at at this point so uh honestly we've grown quite quickly in so we just 15 months old and we've grown like so much I mean we we never expected this kind of growth
organically to happen um so both on the online and offline front so currently we only have one offline store in uh Pune in Cora Park area of Pune so we're starting our franchise model so we are opening five stores um by by April uh next April in next six months um on online um we are also start we've also starting started with global deliveries so I think um this demy jewelry is a huge Market globally not only in India so um I think we have opened that up as well online so um we are aggressively
growing and this being our festive season this being a season where you know um the demand of the jewelry is organically very very high so I think we're just caching on it right now right and can you give us a sense of the scale of the business currently any kind of numbers that you can share with us in terms of Revenue in terms of funding path through profitability sure So currently we are doing one CR a month run rate um and um in the festive season we are uh predicting to grow around 25% month on
month um in terms of funding we are already in talks with couple of investors so we will close our pre- series around very very soon uh maybe in next 60 to 90 days we'll close our first round um and uh I think even organically uh the kind of traction we are getting through our Instagram so we have a very Clos nit community of 50,000 um you know followers on Instagram who are very very active and very reactive to all the content that we post so I think uh it's it's sort of a 360 degree growth
we are eyeing on right now okay what would you say pvi have been your biggest challenges in getting this uh entire brand off ground and scaling up to this level I think biggest challenge has been the category education like I said demine jewelry nobody knows in India what demine is I mean Palmas is a pioneer of demine Jewelry in India so you know teaching people uh informing people what demine is and they just could not get that fact uh you know around their head that there can be something that can replace the gold you know
so unless you touch and feel the product unless you use the product you will not believe when somebody says that you can actually get a soliter ring in 2,000 Rupees right and you can literally wear it every single day so uh I think category education has been a great uh you know pain point for us but we sort of could overcome that through influencer marketing um where influencers are actually using the product and they're actually talking about their experience in the videos and since since that started happening people started believing and people started you know
trusting with their first purchase and once the first purchase is done then I think it's like 90% of the job is done because they keep coming back so um I think this has been the major paino till now in this journey okay right and you know you just spoke about influencer marketing is that one of your main channels of marketing what are the other channels that you really use to get the word out there about the brand so um influencer is one of the actually very important channel for us uh because this industry is such
that people um follow their favorite influencers favorite celebrities for their Trends you know what are they wearing how are they styling so um because this category is very very influential so influencer marketing is definitely working the best for us but simultaneously we are also doing a lot of paid marketing on medium like Facebook Instagram um you know Google YouTube so um we we want to reach out to our target audience everywhere that they go so it's like I mentioned that 360 degree marketing is something that we are targeting on right now so it so it's
it's like literally everywhere okay so P explain to our viewers about Demi Fine Jewelry uh how is it different from the Demi fine jewelry that you get abroad and uh how is it different from the other kind of artificial or gold plated silverplated jewelry that you get here in India right so I think uh to to put it very simply Demi fine is it this as a category sits exactly in between fine and imitation okay so um it's it is as good as um Fine Jewelry in terms of look and feel um but it's it's
little expensive compared to your imitation jewelry for example if a imitation jewelry necklace you can buy in 300 400 rupees our jewelry starts at around, 1500 rupees so but by paying 1500 what kind of benefits you get is the jewelry is made of safe materials so you don't have to worry about your skin you don't have to worry about getting rashes secondly jewelry is coated with a very thick layer of gold every order comes with one year uh uh sorry lifetime warranty and um Hallmark certificate so it the authenticity of the materials is 100% guaranteed
right and you get all of this at a fraction of the price so even on the website you would have seen that we mentioned that if you buy the same piece in pure gold it will cost you XYZ and palmona piece is costing you so much so that's how we sort of compare ourselves with uh you know the the pure gold jewelry players because we are sort of trying to create a um a market for ourselves where we're trying to replace the uh gold usage for everyday wear jewelry okay and of course with Diwali here
and coming up now what kind of offers can consumers expect we have amazing so basically we are a no discount brand um but this Diwali um we have amazing offers on the website so we have minimum 30% off on the website and more you buy more you save so if you buy one product you get extra 10% off you buy two products you get extra 15% and then three two or more products you get extra 20% off so we are doing this because we want to open our top of the funnel we want more people
to try our products and you know get more comfortable with the the idea of wearing Demi fine every single day so I think it's raining discounts on the website right now and in the longer term uh you know what kind of vision do you have for ponas in terms of would you rather it be a purely online or a combination of online offline how many stores uh would you sort of plan to expand to it's definitely going to be a combination of online and offline uh because I feel um jewelry as a category is very
impulse purchase category right so uh people you know just go to a mall or they go to airport where they're just passing time and they see some jewelry store they walk in and they just buy right gifting is also a huge angle in our sector so uh I think it's definitely going to be a combination of brick and morar and online but in my personal op Demi fine is going to win in next two to three years because Rising gold prices every single day so Mass India is not going to afford to buy a lot
of gold jewelry right lot of gold jewelry pieces so I think they definitely need something which is as classy as gold but of course comes at a fraction of the price so I think demine category is going to be huge in India in next two to three years and palmona is going to be a front runner of that whole growth so very very excited all right we leave it there palvi thank you so much for joining us and wishing you all the very best thank you so much for having me thank you so [Music] much
